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During a panel on IoE in Business last week, Stanley Black & Decker announced the results and estimated productivity savings, upside revenue, and risk cost avoidance of a new Connected Factory Wireless implementation conducted with Cisco and AeroScout Industrial. In partnership with AeroScout, we’re excited to share the details on how Stanley Black & Decker has transformed manufacturing operations with IoT.

Yesterday afternoon, Cisco hosted an “Internet of Everything in Business” roundtable discussion–featuring executives from Stanley Black & Decker, AeroScout Industrial, salesforce.com and FH Celebration Health–which spotlighted how the Internet of Everything (IoE) is fueling transformative business outcomes and results … Today! In the session, our panelists discussed ways they are actually acquiring some of the $14+ trillion of global, private-sector value-at-stake estimated by Cisco to be available with IoE by 2022, and included real-world examples illustrating manufacturing and healthcare industry benefits.

Yesterday’s panel representatives from Stanley Black & Decker and AeroScout Industrial provided highly repeatable manufacturing use case examples describing how they are already achieving benefits today, as well as helping their customers to capture value with IoE. Utilizing location based services, real-time productivity and work-in-progress (WIP) monitoring, manufacturing businesses are seeing a strong return on investment and improved safety and security in the workplace.

Above, catch the roundtable–recorded live from Chicago–and learn amongst those IoE use case examples how Cisco Systems and AeroScout Industrial partnered to implement a productivity-and-throughput-driving solution at a Stanley Black & Decker (SB&D) plant in Reynosa, Mexico. And keep your eye on the Cisco IoE blog channel early next week for my deeper dive on that very real, high-impact, highly replicable SB&D customer case study. Thanks for reading!

My colleague Douglas Bellin is quoted in the article that “IoT necessitates a break from siloed thinking”. He explains:

“The biggest benefit we are going to start to see is the correlation of information from systems that typically did not work together or were not thought of needing to reference each other. Historically, the information was stored in silos and was very difficult to get to. Now we are adding the connectivity to these machines and are able to extract the data, move the data, store it, and analyze it to see if abnormalities are occurring.”

Read more on Doug’s thoughts regarding IoT benefits in one of his recent blogs “Imagine the Possibilities with IoT and IoE”. The benefits that result from converging your production environment and IACS with Enterprise IT infrastructure into a fully Connected Factory can be quite significant, and have been for many global manufacturers like GM. The MMH article quotes Bill Ferrell of Clemson University (my undergraduate alma mater), “If the Internet of Things is this concept that inanimate objects can communicate over the Internet and be controlled, that strikes me as having the potential to revolutionize the way manufacturing is done.”

For a glimpse into what you can expect, some of my colleagues in Cisco Consulting Services created an animated infographic that presents some of the business outcomes and results of implementing IoT and IoE into manufacturing operations. Take a look:

Let me know what you think. Do you agree these are the four most applicable business use case scenarios for IoT adoption today? What other manufacturing imperatives and business outcomes are you looking to achieve with IoT / IoE? Send me a comment. Thanks for reading.

Recently, I was able to spend a day with a leading food manufacturer whose products you most likely enjoyed at your Fourth of July barbecue. I was with this customer to see what they have implemented and help them understand some next steps to leverage IoT to enhance their business.

I was pleasantly surprised with the automation that this CPG customer already had in place. I was even more pleased with the fact that they use ourjoint Cisco and Rockwell Automation architecture as their standard for their industrial network implementation. They had just completed a new processing-to-packaging line that had over 200 different sensors aggregated up to 15 Stratix switches (Rockwell OEM products from Cisco) and then are bringing this to their operational systems for tracking and tracing.

The amount of robotics in use at this food company was pretty incredible to witness. The automation improvements were not taking away jobs but rather, adding value and new ways to up-skill line workers to take on more decision making and control of their roles in operations. Automation in this sense is moving the mundane repetitive roles away from human beings and into machines. This in itself adds tremendous value in terms of health and safety improvements. We are seeing this with not just this company but other CPG customers as well. Take a look at the CPG video below which profiles some additional automation use cases in action:

Currently their office systems are virtually separated from their operations but this will cease in the next few weeks as they are seeing benefits of tying all their operational, planning and other systems all together. This is where Cisco and our partners are bringing value—to help them understand what data they have and how this can move from data to intelligence. One key area is bringing the operational data into preventative data software to no longer “run to break down” but start to plan maintenance plans and schedules. Once we have this in place, we are going to help this company move to predictive maintenance where we take all the variables (the human resources aspects- who is available, scheduling, ordering, forecasting and more) to drive to schedule maintenance depending upon the many variables for optimization.

At the same time, we are talking about building metrics so that the various locations can be compared to start to see what can be improved at the locations from other locations to start to drive plant optimization to the next level. This includes standardizing metrics across all locations, standardizing reporting and delivery mechanisms such as our remote access capabilities and visual factory solutions. The reason they are able to do this is that they have already started to drive standardization of their networking down to the PLC layer following the Cisco and Rockwell architecture. Once this is in place, the drive towards IoT and IoE are much easier.

Others have done this across multiple industries and we are seeing this start to become implemented not just in the big companies but also the small and mid-size companies that make up the bulk of our world manufacturing economy. IoT can truly make a difference for food manufacturers, both big and small. Thanks for reading.

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